Facebook is providing brand marketers with more information about consumers that are within close proximity of their retail stores, according to a company blog post. The social network is launching two new products for retailers: one designed to help SMBs better understand the foot traffic in their area, and another set to enable large retailers to tailor ads to specific store locations.
The first product is included as a new tab as part of its Page Insights feature, enabling brands to track aggregate demographics and local trends. Brands can view this information for people that pass within 150 feet, 450 feet and 1,500 feet of a store’s location, according to AdWeek. With this information, businesses can discover the area’s busiest times of the week, to better gauge which shoppers are most likely to visit their store. Marketers can see specific demographic data of shoppers, including age and gender, and whether they are a tourist or a local opportunity.
“Local businesses that run ads have historically had a hard time figuring out if their ads are reaching the right people — the people near their store,” according to the post. “Now, for the first time, advertisers can see the percentage of people nearby who have seen their ad, helping them understand how well their ads are reaching their potential customers. Over time, this new metric can also help advertisers draw a connection between reaching a larger percentage of people nearby and accomplishing the business outcomes they care about.”
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The feature only will collect data from people who have location services enabled. To protect the privacy of Facebook users, data is anonymized and only shown in percentages and overall trends, not absolute numbers.
The second product allows businesses using Facebook’s Locations for Pages tool to use information from each individual page to add dynamic ad copy, links and call-to-action buttons to their ads, so each ad is localized for its corresponding store.
“If a café with multiple locations in the Bay Area decides to run local awareness ads, they could choose to automatically populate the city name in their ad copy, depending on where the people seeing the ad are located,” the blog post explained. “So, people in Menlo Park would see “Join us for lunch in Menlo Park,” while people in San Francisco would see “Join us for lunch in San Francisco.”
These updates simplify ad targeting, allowing the business to choose a target radius around each individual store and select each store they want to run ads for.
